High-quality backlinks and How to create high-quality backlinks?

High-quality backlinks all SEO’s dream and all websites need this for growing online.

Well, Google hints that links from “Great websites” is a good indication that information is well trusted. But that’s kind of vague too. The point is that how to create high-quality backlinks? but not every backlink is created equal.

Some help your pages rank higher in Google, others will look like they’re doing completely zero, and some may harm.

So today, we’re going to talk about classifying high-quality backlinks that will push the needle for your site.

First, you begin with keyword analysis. Of course, you had look at the number of links that are pointing at the top-ranking pages. So you click on the number of the backlinks to see who’s linking to the page. Then you spot-check the report.

Without further analyzing your link prospects, you could very well be building bad-links or links that won’t actually help you.

So what you need to do is identify your competitor’s high-quality backlinks. So, you can know which pages will be worth getting a link from and the way you’re going to do that is by asking yourself a series of questions.

First, ask yourself is the site’s content relevant to my niche?

Imagine this for a second.

You ask two friends for a recommendation for some best Italian restaurant in the town.

One of your friends is a chef at an Italian-restaurant and other is a football coach who’s allergic to tomatoes. Whose opinion would you hold higher?

Probably the chef since you recognize that they have experience with Italian cuisine.

In the same way, links from a website about Italian food, Italy or recipes would be more powerful than links from sites regarding technology or marketing.

For example:-

You’ll observe that this page is linking to the top-ranking URL for the inquiry “best running shoes”.

But if you look at the content on the site, it looks more like a personal blog on random subjects rather than on running, fitness, or any other topics.

So, in terms of site-wide relevance, it’s not quite there. Now, with this one, you can probably guess that the site would be relevant based on just the domain name.

Now, this brings up the question, what about links from sites like news publications that cover a ton of topics, like The Times of India?

This is where you need to ask yourself: Is the page related to my niche and/or the topic of my content?

The Times of India covers various broad topics across their entire site. And just because they cover everything, it doesn’t mean that links from there are worthless. In fact, the opposite could be true.

Now, if you look at the link profile of the running shoe page, you’ll see that they have a link from Business Insider and based on just the title alone, you can recognize that the page is completely about running shoes.

The post is about economics and possibly politics. So even though they’re linking to the same page, it doesn’t change the fact that post is regarding economics, not fitness or clothes.

So in our opinion, we probably wouldn’t reach out to this site for a link since the page and website aren’t topically relevant. Now, everything that I’ve explained up to this point is about topical and contextual relevance. But another thing to consider is “locational” relevance.

For example:-

If you’re a Delhi based photographer you’d probably want to rank your pages in Delhi and the surrounding area. After all, that’s where the bulk of your customers will likely be.

So in our opinion, we think it’d also be worth building links from websites about Delhi that might be from non-competing Delhi-based wedding vendors, or Delhi lifestyle blogs.

The next question to ask yourself does the linking site have authority?

DR is a score on a scale from 0 to 100, which describes the overall strength of a website’s backlink profile and within the high-quality backlinks report, you can see the metric alongside each linking page.

For personally, I don’t really use website authority as the main metric. Rather, I use it to measure if these people have got high-quality backlinks throughout their site. It’s also a great metric to use as an initial start for link prospecting.

For example:-

If we export backlinks from using the SEO tool report, then we can open it in Google Sheets and create a filter. So, we’ll click on Filter by the condition. Then we’ll choose the “Greater than or equal to” option and then add something like 30 for the value and just by doing that, we would able to cut down our initial list by around 77%, meaning a lot of backlinks from “weaker” sites.

Now, it’s important to note that while this might be a good starting point, we wouldn’t recommend only reaching out to sites with a certain DR score. You have to also keep in mind that a DR-15 site today, could continually build authority over time, making your link on that page potentially more valuable in the future.

Alright, the next thing to ask yourself is: Is the website getting consistent traffic from Google?

Now, when you see significant drop-offs, it’s better to stay clear. Even outside of algorithm updates, you can’t really conclude what happened with certainty. For all you know, you may be building links on sites that had previously been penalized for things like selling links and you probably wouldn’t want your site to be associated with them.

So long story short, it’s best to make sure that the site doesn’t appear to have been penalized or is getting steady organic traffic growth over time. To see whether a website is getting constant traffic from Google, you can use Ahrefs’ Site Explorer.

Enter domain, click on the Organic-search tab, and you’ll notice the expected amount of search-traffic site receives as a whole.

Next, ask yourself, does that linking page get search traffic?

In the high-quality backlinks report, you can see whether the pages are receiving search-traffic and getting links from pages with traffic can be great for some of the reasons.

First, you identify that the page is likely still in Google’s good-books because if they’re growing search-traffic, then they’re ranking.

And second, the more traffic a linking page gets, the better your chances of getting more referral traffic.

The next question is: are most external links on their site no-followed?

As far as we know, links with the Nofollow attribute don’t pass value. So you wouldn’t want to waste time building nofollow links.

Example:- Let’s assume that you’re running a guest posting campaign where you plan to join-back to one of your resources. You can go to a webpage, right-click on an external-link, and then use Chrome’s “Inspect” feature to see the HTML-code of that link. If you observe that rel=”nofollow” tag, there’s a decent chance they may no-follow a lot of other external-links on their. A more reliable way to check is using paid SEO tools like Aherfs, SEMrush, MOZ, etc.

If a page has a ton of external links on its page, less authority is transferred via all external links.

So you probably don’t want links from pages that are linking to a thousand other pages and you can see the number of external links on the page using SEO tools.

Now, should you only go for links that match all of the criteria that we’ve talked about?

We say no because you’d be limiting your pool of prospects a bit too much. Instead, use these as guidelines to determine the amount of time and effort you’re willing to put into gaining links from certain pages and sites.

And also use them to find which sites you’ll need to avoid creating high-quality backlinks on.

Now, if you enjoyed this blog, make sure to share, and we recommend checking out our other blogs. Because we go into a ton of detail about strategies and increasing link and other.